During lockdown, we decided to do something new and jumped into the “meal kit” world and decided to try Chef’s Plate.
Now to be clear, my husband and I LOVE to cook. It is one of our life’s pleasures and we love to try new foods, so initially, my husband was a little apprehensive.
He is the one who does most of the cooking, and if you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you know that he loves to cook (any excuse to break out the cast iron pan or his dutch oven, and he’s right there!)
Our oldest son and his little brother also currently cook for the monthly Kids Cooking Club “Raddish Kids” and just recently cooked a South-Asian themed meal based on the Disney+ movie, “Raya and The Last Dragon” – you can read more about that here.
If you can’t tell, we’re quite food-obsessed in our house and I’m happy to say that our kids have also followed in our footsteps, enjoying a healthy love affair with all types of food and flavours.
What is Chef’s Plate?
If you’re not familiar with Chef’s Plate, Chef’s Plate is a meal kit delivery service. Every week you get to choose from a selection of meals along with the number of meals and servings you’d like to have for yourself.
The way it works is that our delivery day falls on a Monday and we order before the Wednesday of the prior week.
Choosing the meals from the Chef's Plate menu is always a fun experience; I find that my kids love going to the website, looking at all the beautiful food pictures, and deciding what they’d like to try for the upcoming week.
For us, the experience of using Chef’s Plate has been extremely positive and so I decided to put together a list of the things that we really enjoy but before we move on, I did want to mention that when choosing from the Chef’s Plate recipes you will want to note that some of the meal-offerings do have a premium charge.
What this means is that you will be paying a little more per serving for certain meals if you decided to choose them.
If you don’t want to incur those charges, just choose the meals without the extra charge – there are so many meal choices that you could literally never order a premium meal and you would still have an excellent selection.
For us, we have ordered the premium meals and for us, the extra charge has been worth it.
10 Reasons We Love Ordering Chef's Plate
#1 – “Mise en place” is a French term for having all your ingredients measured, cut, peeled, sliced, grated, etc. before you start cooking. It essentially means “setting up” Pans are prepared. Mixing bowls, tools, and equipment is all set out.
What I love about the Chef’s plate package is that all the ingredients are already portioned out for you, so you essentially lay everything out from the meal package, and you can get to cooking. Not only does it save a lot of time and mess in the kitchen BUT is it great for those of you who do not cook a lot. It’s a great introduction and making your way into the cooking arena by experimenting with meal kits.
It's much less stressful than having to source all the materials. You know everything is right there waiting for you in the box!
#2 – Visual recipes. The recipe cards are gorgeous. The recipe cards with Chef’s Plate are beautiful and colourful – they make cooking a delightful experience.
The recipe cards are also very easy to understand, with step-by-step instructions. Our 12 year-old cooks full meals using Chef’s Plate from start to finish – they are that easy to follow.
In fact, you can watch him and my husband put together a Chef’s Plate meal here – in this video they are making Bavarian Pork Chops recipe, it’s SOOO good!
# 3 – Good Food, Very Tasty – We have now ordered from Chef’s Plate many, many times, and the food itself is very tasty. I think of all the meals we have ordered and there have been many, all of them have been flavourful.
Of course, as with anything, there are some that we liked more than others, but it wasn’t a lack of flavour – but more of personal preference.
Speaking of flavour, all the Chef’s Plate meals have had gorgeous flavour. For example, all the meals we’ve ordered that include a meat portion, contain a beautiful flavour rub for the meat. The rubs are always very flavorful and truthfully, any nice rub will always elevate what might normally be a bland piece of meat.
Makes Dinner An Event
The next 3 steps made dinner an event that was always a fun bonus in our house.
# 4 – Restaurant-style eating at home. This was a big one. Like I mentioned my husband and I love to cook and we will often try different recipes, but during the busy week, with not a lot of time, we often rely on our own staples.
With Chef’s Plate, we got to try different types of recipes but it’s not overwhelming. As I said, everything is already laid out and you just follow the lovely recipe cards.
Under 30 minutes you get a meal that you would not normally cook at home but would love to try. During lockdown and being stuck at home, having Chef’s Plate broke up the monotony and gave us something to look forward to – almost like eating at a restaurant which we of course couldn’t do during lockdown. The convenience of eating a nice restaurant-style meal, but at home.
With Chef’s Plate you can have something new and exciting, all in under 30 minutes!
It just provided a nice bright spot in the week and we appreciated that!
# 5 Cook with the Family.
This is one of my favourite reasons. The days that Chef’s Plate was delivered makes for an exciting day at our house. Both of our kids would literally “whoop” with joy when it got dropped on our doorstep. It’s about simple pleasures and we are all for it!
We also really value that the kids were excited about the meals but also that they enjoyed cooking the meals with us. Both of our children are homeschooled and I believe that learning how to cook is an extremely important life skill. I loved seeing them figure out how to cook the recipes. The experience of them helping in the kitchen and then enjoying the fruits of their labour was always a great feeling to behold.
Plus, when the kids are excited to try new tastes, that's always a great thing. A broader palette is a better palette.
# 6 – Date Night.
On the flip side, during the lockdown, if the kids wanted a pizza night, the hubby and I would use the Chef’s Plate meal as a special “date” night for us. It was nice to have a nice quiet meal, just the 2 of us, and again enjoy something we wouldn’t normally make for ourselves.
Kinda like a date in a restaurant, but without having to wear masks.
# 7 Learning new culinary skills.
Maybe you notice a theme here, but we're into learning new things and with Chef’s Plate you can learn some new skills! Whether it’s us (the parents) discovering something new in terms of skill or flavour combinations, or the kids learning how to “sautee” something, I’m glad we've been able to utilize the Chef's Plate boxes as a learning experience.
My husband often whips something together a few weeks later and claims he learned it from making a Chef's Plate recipe earlier in the year.
# 8 Inexpensive compared to eating at a restaurant.
As I mentioned, having Chef's Plate made it seem like we were at a restaurant all with the convenience of eating at home. Of course, during the lockdown, being at home was a necessity and this was a nice reprieve. Ordering these meal kits were also inexpensive to eating at a traditional restaurant which was nice and budget-friendly.
Now, while on the topic of being budget-friendly, they also offer lots of specials and you can even offer a discount code to those who try the meal kit service through you! So for all of you out there who would like to try Chef's Plate Canada, I can offer you a $40 discount just for trying Chef's Plate through my link.
The other thing I want to mention since it is tangentially related to being budget-friendly is that there are several types of meal kits to choose from, so you can choose what is right for you and your budget. For example, you can have 2 or 4 meals a week and you can choose the number of servings.
Warning! The Chef's Plate portions were quite large and for a family of 4 that eats a lot (I have a growing almost teenage boy) this was great to realize as we almost always had leftovers for the next day!
#9 Unboxing. Maybe not a big draw for some people, but unboxing the Chef’s Plate box was always incredibly fun for us! I don’t know about you, but I think there is always something exciting about getting a package in the mail, and there is something about pulling things out of a box that is surprising and too fun! Who doesn’t need that kind of lightness and fun in their life?! I know I welcome it!
#10 – You are not locked in. No commitment – order when you want. I think that having to commit to a meal service is daunting which is why I love that Chef’s Plate fits into your schedule. You can cancel or skip weeks as need be. I loved the flexibility of the plan and appreciated that we could use the meal service, when we wanted with commitment or the need to cancel.
So that’s it, what I loved about the Chef’s Plate experience. All in all, we love ordering Chef’s Plate. In fact the weeks where we’ve had to miss it either because of busy weeks or various other plans, we found ourselves missing it.
Chef's Plate Discount & Free Box
It has definitely been something that our family looks forward to, and we love having made it part of how we, as a family, approach dinner time. If you are interested in trying Chef’s Plate for a $40 discount code, click here, I also periodically have a Chef's plate free box free boxes to give away, a great way to try it risk-free! Contact me via my blog contact form if interested.
If you’ve tried Chef’s Plate let me know in the comments and what your favourite meal has been. I love trying new recipes and would love to hear what you enjoyed!
